IREV Won’t Fail During Guber Polls, We’ve Activated Second Option – INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said issues witnessed in the last election with its result viewing portal has been resolved.

The IReV portal was part of the technologies introduced by the commission to improve the transparency of the electoral process, but it failed during the presidential election as results could not be viewed online in real time.

The commission had previously assured that polling unit results would be uploaded to the portal in real time during the presidential election which held on February 25.The portal was, however, inactive for a long time, even after voting had ended in some polling units and as at the time of this report, not all results have been uploaded.

Speaking on Sunday when he featured on Channels Television’s ‘Sunday Politics’, Festus Okoye, INEC national commissioner, acknowledged that there were challenges with the portal on election day.He said necessary adjustments have been made to the portal to ensure optimal function during the governorship and state assembly polls of March 18.

“There is no technology that does not have challenges. Yes, we promised that results will be uploaded in real time to our result viewing portal, but there were challenges. We already explained to Nigerians that these glitches happen, we didn’t anticipate that we’re going to have these challenge,” he said.

Whatever challenges we recorded, we have made very serious efforts to rectify them so that during the governorship and state assembly elections, we won’t record the same issues going forward.

“We have rectified the challenges we experienced during the presidential and national assembly polls.

“No national commissioner of the commission was happy with what happened. This is because this commission has been built around serving the people of this country. We had situations where even corps members were held hostage in polling units.”

Okoye said the electoral body has activated a second option in the event of a challenge with uploading of results.

“So we have made the necessary amendments, we have learned the necessary lessons from this and we have also activated an option B in terms of how we approach the issue of result upload,” he said.

“We are confident that the portal will not fail. If we have any challenge relating to the uploading of polling unit results, the ICT knows what to do so that we don’t have the type of challenge we had during the presidential election.”